Classroom disruption: the federal Individuals With Disabilities Act, up for renewal, adds to schoolhouse violence

Insight on the News, Sept 11, 1995 by Stephen Goode

Adisabled, violent student in North Carolina broke her teacher's arm in a classroom fray. A disabled Oklahoma student stabbed her teacher with a nail she had secreted into class. What followed? Summary expulsion, or at least placement in more restrictive classrooms?

No. Under the 1975 Individuals With Disabilities Act, or IDEA, which provides the special programs designed to educate and create opportunities for disabled students, the teachers and school officials in the two states may deal with such violent and disruptive students with only mild punishments.

The Oklahoma student received a three-day suspension, for example, and the North Carolina girl was suspended from school for two days, even though similar acts by nondisabled students would have resulted in much harsher measures.

Such incidents, now commonplace, have led the two major teachers' unions -- the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association -- along with several professional organizations, such as the National Association of Elementary School Principals, to demand a major overhaul of the IDEA. They believe its provisions have been responsible for allowing the situation to get completely out of hand and they are glad it is before Congress for reevaluation.

Violent and disruptive behavior by disabled students has ranged from defecating in the classroom to the regular battering of teachers and even the murder of other students.

Says Michael Resnick, spokesman for the National School Boards Association, "What we are asking is that disabled students be treated the same way as nondisabled students -- that all students be viewed as equal." Resnick and other professionals want to see the IDEA revamped to protect teachers and students from violence in the classroom -- allowing school authorities to remove disruptive students and, preferably, transfer them to settings in which their special needs can be met. "Nondisabled students have rights too," says Resnick.

Pitted against these educators are parents of disabled students and leaders of organizations that represent the disabled, such as the Berkeley-based Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund. These groups regard any changes in the IDEA as a slippery slope down which hard-won rights for the disabled will slide into Dickensian misery.

What special-education advocates want is a school system "where no child is deprived of education and there is no one who is expelled," says Myrna Mandlawitz, a specialist in government affairs for the national Association of State Directors of Special Education, based in Alexandria, Va. Mandlawitz argues that a strong federal presence in special education -- and a strong IDEA -- is needed because the states have "a bad record," particularly before the 1975 passage of this law.

At issue is a practice called "inclusion," initiated about 15 years ago and now widespread, in which disabled students are taken from special-education centers and other specialized schools and grouped in regular classrooms with the nondisabled. The theory behind inclusion is that the disabled will benefit from association with other students and will not tend to regard themselves as irredeemably different.

According to Department of Education figures, 4.8 million school-age children are defined as disabled, the vast majority (3.5 million) of whom fall into such broad categories as the learning disabled and those with speech and language impairments -- groupings that include dyslexics and the hyperactive. About 550,000 are mentally retarded, while deaf and blind students number just under 100,000.

Inclusion means mainstreaming such disabled students as dyslexics -- many of whom can profit from contact with nondyslexics and only some of whom need highly individualized education, according to Steve Laubacher, executive director of the Orton Dyslexia Society, based in Baltimore.

But also mainstreamed are the disabled children with Down syndrome and the autistic, who require a great deal of personal attention, who sometimes are not toilet trained (requiring schools to provide special diapering rooms) and who can be violent.

Under an IDEA "stay-put provision," teachers and school officials can suspend disabled students from any category for only 10 days without then going to court to obtain permission from a judge to continue the suspension.

It's at this point that school authorities feel most frustrated -- and it is at this point that many educators who otherwise support special education become doubtful. Says John Brennan, a retired adjustment counselor in psychological services with the Boston public schools, "I think there is a need for the programs, but without the farout social theories in which the special-ed people begin to pursue one crazy fad after another."

Going to court to remove a student deemed disruptive and a danger to him or herself and others takes time and a great deal of money. Judges are prone to grant suspension of violent students only in cases in which a life is threatened -- something teachers and school officials find difficult to prove.